Accidental Innuendo: There is a Firebreather in the Burned Tower named Dick in Gold and Silver. It's probably no coincidence that he is removed in Crystal and had his name changed to Richard in Heart Gold and SoulSilver.

Breather Boss: The Kanto Gym Leaders in general aren't particularly difficult because their team levels are about the same as the Elite Four; it's not until Blaine that you encounter a Pokémon (his Rapidash) at Lv. 50, the level of Lance's strongest Dragonite that you would've had to beat to get into Kanto. Janine in particular is laughably easy, since her Pokémon's levels are all in the 30s range when the Elite Four was in the 40s.

Broken Base: The conspicuous absence of Crystal on the Virtual Console has caused this. Either one is fine with this as releasing what is meant to be the definitive version would logically hamper sales of the other two versions, or one sees it as Nintendo holding it back for the sole purpose of releasing it later, prompting buyers to double-dip for it.

Consider how often you, anyone you know, or anyone you've seen play these games have ever picked Chikorita. Many Pokémon in the games are weak to Typhlosion's Fire-type attacks (notably being the best counter to the new Steel type as their Special Defense is never as good as their Defense, which is generally high enough to tank their other two physical weaknesses to Fighting and Ground), while Feraligatr quickly gets a powerful STAB move in Surf right before the 4th badge. Meganium, sadly, struggles to damage most of the gyms, the Elite Four and the largely Poison-oriented Team Rocket, won't get any better STAB move than Razor Leaf (which has been nerfed from Gen I to stop constantly getting critical hits) for most of the game, has the most restricted movepool and worst offensive stats among the three starters, and its cutesy design is generally regarded as less cool-looking than the more ferocious designs of Typhlosion and Feraligatr.

Competitively, this generation is (in)famous for how stall tactics ruled the Metagame, to the point of being the dominant strategy. Snorlax was also used on the majority of teams due to being theMighty Glacier, making it one of the best abusers of the new moves Curse and Belly Drum.

A habit that started from this metagame was carrying around random Fire-type moves to avoid being walled by Steel-types (particularly before the Physical/Special split, when Fire was the only one out of Steel's three weaknesses that could bypass their huge Defense and take advantage of their often mediocre Special Defense).

Disappointing Last Level: It's cool to revisit Kanto, but most of the trainers and Gym Leaders are around or even below the levels of the Elite Four, and will get swept away by your Champion team. There's also not a lot to do aside from beating the Gym Leaders, fixing the Power Plant and defeating Red.

Although all three of the starters are popular, Cyndaquil seems to have become the most popular Gen 2 Starter. This is in part because Typhlosion is a beast at higher levels, gets a nice coverage in Thunderpunch in the originals and great for taking down the Steel type, and simply because all three versions are adorable.

Tyranitar is very popular, for being the Pokémon universe's spin on Godzilla and very powerful in battle.

Pinsir's counterpart, Heracross, is up there in popularity, mostly due to being a Badass Adorable Bug/Fighting-type Pokémon. This is especially considering how rareit is and having no useful Fighting-type STABs to use back then.

Jasmine is a pretty popular Gym Leader, even getting a cameo in the Sinnoh games. It helps that she's the only one of the three new female Gym Leaders who doesn't get obnoxious about losing.

The rival Silver is arguably the most popular human character of the Johto games, and frequently rivals Blue in being the most popular rival in the series.

Epileptic Trees: Where Lugia's Psychic-type comes from generates a lot of questions even to this day.

Even Better Sequel: When released, Gold and Silver were highly praised by gamers and critics alike for being an overall better game than the originals. They introduced a number of mechanics that would become staples to the franchise as a whole: breeding, holding items, Day/Night cycles, shiny Pokémon, hour-based schedules, protagonists of both sexesnote only in Crystal, special Poké Balls, rematches with trainers previously fought, and friendship evolution.

These games introduced roaming Legendaries, Pokémon that randomly move across the region. Should you, by chance, find one, they will run from the battle at the first opportunity. This basically forces you to spend several hours trying to find them so you can slowly whittle down their health before they run off, taking great care not to knock them out, and eventually try to catch them. Remember that as Legendaries, they have the lowest catch rate possible, and you will only get one chance to toss a ball before they run off. Having something with Mean Look will stop them from fleeing, but all three of them have Roar to make you run away instead.

A controversial introduction was Baby Pokemon. Cuteness aside, they are often viewed as utterly irrelevant because they ultimately evolve (usually via happiness) into an already existing Pokemon, likely one that you had to breed (often with certain incenses in later generations) to get the baby in the first place. Generally, the only incentive to hatching them outside of filling the Pokedex is that they learn good moves that their evolved forms would miss out on, like Pichu learning Nasty Plot.

A disliked introduction are trade evolutions that need a Pokémon to hold a specific item. Even with the introduction of the GTS in later games, getting these trade evos is nearly impossible, because anyone offering the Pokémon in question either doesn't have the necessary item on them, or otherwise asks for a Legendary or the evolved form you're trying to get. What's more, even if you specifically request that you recieve a Pokémon holding the item, it's more a suggestion in practice; one that no-one will follow, by the by, netting themselves a free Rhyperior and leaving you with a Rhydon and no Protector. Oh, and woe betide those who fail to get a hold-item trade evo when the item necessary to evolve them is either very hard to get, or is only available once per game.

Gen II started the trend of other "gimmicky" evolution methods such as a Pokémon needing a High Enough happiness meter, Pokemon only evolving depending on the time of day, and even a Pokémon that required an additional Pokemon present in the party to evolve. While they are not too obtuse in Gold & Silver, these evolution methods would grow only more un-intuitive as the series continues.

Super Rod only being available post-game. Not so bad in Gen II due to a large selection of Water Pokémon and you still can get Old/Good Rods. From Gen IV onwards this is justified that Super Rod is used to fish for Mons not native to the region, but at least lesser fishing rods can still be obtained beforehand. It wasn't until Gen V that fishing is off-limits period until you defeat the Elite Four which doesn't help that Water Pokémon is a minority in Unova. Those who wanted to use Water-types there but hate the Oshawott line will not be pleased.

Many of the new Pokémon added in Gold and Silver were easily missed due to their means of obtaining them, and a large amount of focus was put on the old ones from Generation 1. This wasn't a problem at the time because the new Pokémon only had one generation to compete with and still made up a reasonable percentage of the total available, so they still managed to be memorable. Pokémon X and Y introduced even fewer new Pokémon than Gold and Silver did and had a heavy focus on Pokémon from all of the previous games, but the sheer number of Pokémon made the new ones barely stand out. In fact, a significant portion of the retroactive Hype Backlash is due to Gen VI reminding fans that Gen II had this issue as well.

Feraligatr is a big one, moreso than any other starter. The entire game can be turned into a giant Curb-Stomp Battle with its surprisingly good movepool for this generation (Ice Punch trivializes both the rival and the last gym). Worse, the only two gyms out of 16 that this Pokémon has a disadvantage at are in the post-game and relatively easy. That One Boss, Whitney, struggles to counter a well-raised Water-type. It can breeze through the Elite Four with its HUGE movepool and fast and strong attacks for this generation, curbstomping EVEN THE CHAMPION (Hello, Ice Punch). This Pokémon alone is the reason some found this gen easy, and it is even a common criticism of Gen II's balancing issues in the wake of some Hype Backlash. Even in the remakes, with better balancing, it is still one tough Mon to best.

Typhlosion is no slouch in the remakes. Fast, access to a lot of strong Fire-type moves early on, benefits more from sunlight, and packs the absolutely devastating Eruption, which will likely one-shot anything within five levels. It helps that, like Feraligatr, plenty of gyms have a weakness to it, no less than 4 out of 16, compared to Feraligatr's 2 out of 16. (The only three which are resistant are the final gym (fair enough), and the two post-game ones. Prior to the Physical-Special split it even benefits from a great coverage in Thunder Punch! This and Feraligatr's aforementioned Ice Punch is likely the reason elemental punches are much harder to obtain in subsequent generations when they lost their TM status. Although, it is much less this than Feraligatr was in the originals thanks to much better competitive balance, keeping it from being absolutely broken.

Goddamned Boss: Koga's Muk will use Minimize to make it more likely to avoid hits, all while healing itself with its held item. And it can take a hit, too. His Crobat can also do the same thing with Double Team.

Genius Programming: In development, the game filled up the entire cartridge despite only being half-finished. Satoru Iwata, former president of Nintendo, singlehandedly did some very heavy compression to save the project from being released as an Obvious Beta. When he was done, there was enough space in the cartridge to include all of Kanto. To summarize, thanks to Iwata, this game has twice as big a setting region-wise as every other Pokémon game released until the remakes.

Due to a oversight on Game Freak's part, Rest (the user falls asleep to recover HP) can be used through Sleep Talk (a move which randomly uses one of the user's other three moves while asleep).

A glitch causes Present to use a different damage formula, making it do a lot more (or less) damage than intended based off of various factors. This lets you do humorous things like having the weak Blissey taking off about 70% total HP from an Umbreon.

If a stat gets too high, it will roll over the Cap to a lower value. The easiest way to pull this off is to make a Level 100 Marowak with the highest possible Attack stat and holding a Thick Club use Swords Dance, giving it an Attack stat of 8.

If Belly Drum (maximizes the user's Attack at the cost of half of their max HP) is used by a Pokémon with 50% HP or less, the game will tell you the attack failed but still will give a boost of +2. This is because the game treats Belly Drum as using Swords Dance 12 times but doesn't check the HP value of the user on the first instance. Fixed in Stadium 2.

The cloning trick, coupled with the ability to hold items. Allowing you to get up to five of the same item (and/or Mons) at once, and notably to get all three starters as much as you want (the fact that they don't show up in the Pokédex until you breed one being a small price to pay). Once you've obtained the Master Ball much later in the game, even it becomes insultingly easy to catch the Roaming Legendaries by abusing this trick.

The Celebi Egg Glitch. It involves breeding two Sneasel that have the same moveset with Beat Up as the THIRD move (it doesn't have to be Sneasel, but Beat Up is its Signature Move in Gen II), getting a 'bad clone' from the cloning trick, and five worthless Pokémon. It works because Celebi and Beat Up share the same index number, and its not just Celebi you can get, it's just that Celebi is one of THE most unobtainable Pokémon of them all. For example, using Splash will get you...Mewtwo. This trick can also be used to get held items by using the fourth move, which shares index numbers with items.

Many people agree that this is when the Pokémon game franchise became really good in terms of playability, and to this day it's still the generation with the highest Gamerankings score along with Generation I (and is widely believed to be superior than Gen I). It's widely agreed that the Johto games and their remakes are among the best games in the series; HeartGold and SoulSilver are often cited as the best Pokémon games overall, to the point that they're the only ones that fans of both the older and newer generations tend to agree on.

Competitively, Generation II introduced two important features: the ability for Pokemon to hold items and Special Stat being split to Special Attack and Special Defense. While the competitive scene still was not balanced, it completely changed the viability of several Pokemon and how they were used. Stall actually became a usable strategy through this.

Little did anyone at the time know that anotherItsuki with psychic powers would become a popular character in nerd culture a few years down the line. The Psychic-type is known as the Esper-type in Japan and Korea.

Route 34 is the route containing the second daycare in the series, which may not seem like much, but now it also introduces the concept of breeding. (Kanto's daycare south of Cerulean City only held one Pokémon at a time and also was only useful for raising levels. In the remakes of the first generation, breeding isn't available until the Elite Four is defeated and at a completely different daycare.)

In the Rocket Hideout, at one point you're attacked by two grunts who claim that you cannot take on them both at once. Come next generation, and you have "double battles", with the protagonist routinely taking on two trainers at the same time.

Hype Backlash: Though the new mechanics are warmly embraced, some people view Johto itself as a mere extension of Kanto (which itself gets criticized for losing many features from Gen I) with Pokémon generally rarer and weaker than similar Gen I Pokémon. Such people often have a better opinion of Gen 3 for its distinct region and more prominent new Pokémon when others criticize it for its isolation from the older regions.

It's Easy, so It Sucks: One of the few common complaints towards Gen II is the bad level curve. Whitney's Miltank and Morty's Gengar, the two bosses considered the hardest in the game, are difficult simply because they are fully-evolved Pokémon with high stats at a fairly early point in the game and even then can be beaten with a Geodude/Gravelernote Whitney's Miltank is walled hard and faints to Selfdestruct in one hit while Gengar's Levitate ability wasn't present in Generation 2 and therefore can be one-shotted by Magnitude. After Ecruteak, the next three gyms can be fought in any order, and the trainers' levels at this point were skewed down a little too much to compensate. Kanto also suffers from this when the levels of the trainers are still nowhere near adequate to justify having to fight Lance's level 50 Dragonite to come to the region, but this is fixed in the remakes.

It's Hard, so it Sucks: On the other hand, the lower levels at the end of the game compared to the other generations have also been met with frustration from players. By the point of the last Gym, you're still fighting lv.30s, leading to many tedious hours of Level Grinding necessary if you hope to stand a chance against Lance and his trio of Dragonite. And Arceus help you if you try to add new party members late into the game, especially in Kanto, where they're at mostly the same levels as they were in Gen 1 while all the trainers are much stronger, expecially Red whose team ranges between the 70s-80s!

It Was His Sled: You can revisit the Kanto region after you beat the Elite Four, and at the very end of the game, you fight the True Final Boss, who is none other than Red, the PC from the first generation games. Both were very shocking twists in their day, but nowadays they're common knowledge. See Late-Arrival Spoiler.

Dunsparce has a freaking 1% encounter rate in the Dark Cave outside of swarms. It stats are nothing to write home about either.

Sneasel and Delibird's stats are terrible (though Sneasel's problem lies more in the Physical/Special designation at the time giving it the shaft, rather than just having bad stats like Delibird) and they are uncommon in the lower grounds of Ice Path. It gets worse for the former in Gold and Silver, as it can only be found at the final dungeon of the game.

Ledyba can only be found on a few routes in the morning, and only in Silver. Even as Ledian, its stats are pretty bad, save for its Special Defense, but without a good HP stat and defensive typing to back it up, that may as well be poor too.

Marill is a very uncommon encounter within the depths of the dark Mt. Mortar. Neither it or its evolution have amazing stats.

Slugma. It is a slow and frail Fire-type Pokémon that can only be found in the easily-avoided patch of grass on Kanto's Cycling Road.

Meganium has the dubious honor of being rated as the worst starter Pokémon in the franchise, both competitively and in-game. Even Yellow's Pikachu manages to outrank it. Of the Johto gyms, it's at a disadvantage against five of them (Flying, Bug, Steel, Ice and Dragon) while having an advantage against a whooping zero.

Kurt, since about half of his Poké Balls are lackluster, and most of his were bugged in a major way in the original games. He's also introduced by him falling into a well and hurting his back.

Karen's line, "Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites," is used in parts of the fandom as a creed against things ranging from "Stop Having Fun" Guys, Tournament Play in general or the tiering system used by Smogon.

"Are you a boy or a girl?" The Running Gag of Pokemon Professors (usually Oak) being unable to discern young men from young women was introduced in Crystal.

Whitney's Miltank. Due to being kinda difficult for unprepared trainers, it has gained a reputation of being a terrifying being who only lives to see trainers' hopes and dreams smashed to pieces.

It's like my Rattata is in the top percentage of Rattata!

My Name Is ???note The main rival is initially introduced with an unknown name, hence the question marks, because the player gets to decide his name later. Since a good chunk of the gamers were kids, chances are they choose ??? as his actual name.

Older Than They Think: Due to Hoenn's focus on weather with their mascot legendaries, Castform, the villainous teams, weather-related abilites and the depiction of weather on the overworld, it is easy to forget that 3 out of 4 weather-inducing moves were introduced in this generation.

Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: It's common knowledge that people hate Zubat. They're annoying, they're everywhere, and they have an extremely mediocre evolution in the form of Golbat. But Gen II gave it Crobat, which is much stronger, and much, much, much faster. Sure, it's still annoying as hell, but thanks to Gold and Silver, it became a very viable choice for a good Poison type in your team.

Sacred Cow: Both the original Johto games and the remakes are treated as this by the fandom and are treated as the greatest and most infallible games in the series outside of a few Vocal Minority factions, the remakes slightly more so due to not suffering from Seinfeld Is Unfunny as much as the GBC originals do.

Whitney because of her difficulty and the fact that she throws a tantrum instead of giving you the Plain Badge.

Clair was disliked due to her difficulty, her self-centered personality, and the fact that she refused to give the player the badge until after they found an item.note In Crystal and the remakes, players instead have to take a test by Clair's grandfather about their personality and if passed they will be rewarded with the Rising Badge and a Dratini; with all questions answered right, the Dratini will know Extremespeed!

Scrappy Weapon: Custom Balls made by Kurt, as most of them suffer from bugs that prevented them from working properly.

Friendship-based evolutions. Instead of just slogging through the Elite Four a few times with an experience share to evolve a Pokémon, you need to use them and do things that increase invisible friendship points, such as spending money on very expensive vitamins, frequent barbers in Goldenrod City or using them in battle a lot without them fainting. This is especially difficult with Eevee when you're trying to get Espeon/Umbreon, due to being a weak Pokemon with a limited movepool if you wanted to attempt the latter.

Roaming legendaries. Hard to catch and even harder to find (they don't show up in the Pokédex until you've stumbled upon them once, and even then they tend to run away when you're close to them), getting them is very much a Luck-Based Mission. It's even worse in Crystal, since you need to catch all of them (though thankfully Suicune isn't one of them) to even make Ho-Oh appear. Thankfully, unlike in later generations and the remakes, statuses that prevent moves from being used such as sleep and paralysis do prevent them from fleeing, so no sleep-running Entei.

As if roaming legendaries are not enough, several rare Pokémon in the wild such as Heracross, Delibird and Dratini tend to flee as well. This is to promote the Fast Ball, which quadruples the catch rate if used on the first turn but due to a glitch it only works on Magnemite, Grimer, and Tangela- rendering the Fast Ball near useless in practice.

The Pokégear could be used to record trainers' numbers, allowing for rematches and useful information... but most of the time, the trainers simply called you to tell you about irrelevant personal news like failing to capture a Pidgey. And you had to listen to the stupid message. The phone calls being random, infrequent and beyond your control make matters much worse. The remakes at least offer you the chance to ignore the call by picking something else on the menu or entering a different area.

The levels that wild Pokémon can be found at are some of the lowest in the series and some of the trainers have low-leveled Pokémon too. This means newly caught Pokémon can take a while before becoming useful and makes Level Grinding a pain. Even worse, Red has the highest leveled team in the series outside of Battle Institutes.

The freedom to go anywhere after Ecruteak City was frowned upon for being the reason that the Johto journey up to the eigth badge got saddled with such a poor leveling-curve. The sad part is that this problem remained in the remakes.

Some people were not a fan of several Johto Pokémon, such as Larvitar, Slugma, Houndour, Misdreavus, Murkrow, and Sneasel, being restricted to the Kanto post-game. Clefairy, Diglett, Chansey, Snorlax and Aerodactyl were also restricted to the Kanto post-game, which was an odd case for Chansey given that the Pokémon had a new Johto evolution in Blissey. With the exception of Slugma, this problem remained in the remakes.

Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Red's reveal as the True Final Boss. At the time, it was a shocking twist and completely unprecedented because of how high leveled his pokemon were. In later games it became expected to have a final boss fight with a similar challenge.

Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Karen's speech, "Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites. You know what's important." At first glance, it may be seen as a Broken Aesop, as players whose favorites happen to be powerful may take offense. However, this is not the case - Karen isn't saying "never use powerful Pokémon", but "never choose a Pokémon BECAUSE it is powerful, choose your favourites instead".

Whitney's Clefairy is for the most part is easy to deal with, but the same cannot be said for the infamous Miltank. It has Rollout, a Rock-type attack that gets stronger every consecutive turn it connects, and lasts up to five turnsnote The move's attack power doubles its previous value from hit two onward, meaning on the fifth consecutive hit it's doing 1600% of its base damage. At this stage in the game, Rollout can gradually put the hurt on pretty much anything, even if it resists Rock. Miltank also knows Attract, which can infatuate male Pokemon and give them a 50% chance of not attacking every turn, Stomp, a strong STAB attack with a chance of causing flinching, and Milk Drink to restore health. Add to that Miltank is surprisingly fast and has enough bulk to give most physical attackers pause. In HeartGold & SoulSilver, they gave her the ability "Scrappy" (how appropriate) which allows it to hit Ghost-types with Normal-type attacks. On top of that, they gave it a Lum Berry as a hold item, giving it the ability to remove whatever status ailment you inflicted upon it.

Morty's Gengar was already strong, with STAB Shadow Ball, Hypnosis to put you to sleep, Dream Eater to Life Drain sleeping Mons, and Mean Look to prevent switching out. Then HG/SS improved it even further, with Levitate turning its Ground weakness into an immunity, and Shadow Ball running off Gengar's monstrous Special Attack, instead of its inferior Attack meaning that just about anything that doesn't resist it will be floored in one hit, or have most of their health blasted off. It's other two weaknesses are either easy to counter (Psychic-types are screwed with the presence of Shadow Ball) or scarce (The then-rare Dark-types are mostly unavailable until the very late stages of the game).

Clair's ace: Kingdra, a dual typed Water/Dragon Pokémon. It's only weak against Dragon-type moves, which you are unlikely to have at this point. Kingdra is packing some serious heat in the form of Surf, Dragon Breath, and Hyper Beam - and it has the stats to use those as well. In HG/SS, Kingdra gets even more brutal, with Surf and Dragon Breath upgrading to Hydro Pump and Dragon Pulse, a held Sitrus Berry, and the Sniper ability, which boosts the damage on Kingdra's critical hits.

Champion Lance has 6 Pokemon which all know the super-powerful Hyper Beam. His team consists of 3 under-leveled Dragonite, one of which has Outrage, which will easily take out most of your team unless you happen to have a then-rare Steel type (only 5 fully-evolved Steel Pokemon existed in Generation 2; one is a version exclusive while the other 2 are item trade evos where said item is unavailable until the post-game). They also know Thunder Wave, so chances are you'll be the slower one. His Aerodactyl is super-fast and has the flinch-inducing Rock Slide. Gyarados and Charizard will be the least of your troubles, but even they are quite annoying.

The Lavender Town music. It's a peaceful town after the Pokémon Tower was converted into a radio tower, so it sounds much chirpier than the original. Despite the in-story reason for it sounding happy, people still are divided on whether it's good or not.

Speaking of Lavender Town, the Pokémon Tower graveyard being converted into a radio tower was widely thought to be in poor taste. The graves were relocated to a new site, but seriously.

Kanto as a whole suffers from this trope, with several areas of interest either inaccessible or flat-out gone. The remakes provide a much more faithful representation of the region as it originally was, including the Kanto legendaries and their respective dungeons (which were, respectively, unobtainable and inaccessible in Gen II).

While the other two starters are considered decent Pokemon overall and very good Pokemon in-game, the Chikorita line is pretty terrible by comparison. Meganium has low offensive stats, and a restricted movepool to boot, and high defensive stats which aren't much use due to grass's large number of weaknesses (Grass type has 5 weaknesses- including Poison and Flying types which are commonly used by Team Rocket). To make matters worse, Feraligatr's Ice Punch (Ice Fang in the remakes) means Chikorita gets absolutely destroyed by the starter it's supposed to have an advantage against!

Most Dark-type Pokemon flat-out sucked at their jobs at dealing with Psychics since all Dark moves were considered Special attacks yet most of them have low Special Attack stat. The exceptions being Houndoom (A Glass Cannon with good Special Attack) and Tyranitar (A Mighty Glacier with decent Special Attack). It doesn't help that most of them only appear after beating the Elite Four.

The Ledyba line is considered by many to be one of the worst Pokemon (excluding the Joke Characters) for battling purposes. Ledyba and Ledian specialize in Special Defense, but that's about it. The rest of their stats besides Speed are laughably terrible, and despite being a Stone Wall, Bug/Flying is a poor defensive type combination and they only learn a limited number of supporting moves (the near universal Toxic, Reflect, Light Screen and Baton Pass).

The Slugma line. Not only is Slugma located at Kanto as a rare encounter, Slugma doesn't evolve until Level 38! Its evolved form Magcargo is very underwhelming as none of its stats other than Defense are anything to write home about, while being cripplingly weak to Water- and Ground-types.

For high-tier scrappies, Snorlax is regarded as the absolute best non-Uber Pokemon in the game, with the ability to learn Curse: it can boost its good attack and average defense to complement its intrinsically high health and special defense to become an unstoppable juggernaut. The speed drop that comes from using Curse is irrelevant because of how slow Snorlax already is. The only way to stand a chance against it is to reset its stats either by using Haze, or forcing it to switch out with a move such as Roar or Whirlwind; and even the latter will fail if it's the last Pokemon on the opponent's team. With a lack of means of countering its Curse-based moveset, Snorlax is recognized as the "king" of the GSC metagame.

Tough Act to Follow: Generation 2 improved GREATLY from the first games, and despite Generation 3 and the D/P/Pt games being more advanced with extra features, they suffer from this trope. The remakes, on the other hand, may have came close, if not equal, to the originals.

Ugly Cute: Snubbull and Granbull. Dunsparce as well, being a weird snake... thing.

Gold and Silver played around with the idea of being allowed to journey in multiple directions after departing from Ecruteak City. However, the poor leveling-curve that resulted in low-level Pokémon in whichever side the player chose to save for later ended up doing more harm than good.

The post-game content of Gold and Silver where the player heads off to Kanto to see that region's timeline updated several years after Red's adventure was a great way to extend the Pokémon endgame. Yet apart from the HeartGold and SoulSilver remakes, this was the only generation to do such an extension.

Bugsy is a guy, folks. This is lampshaded during his appearance in the Pokémon Special manga, in which Gold (Ethan's counterpart in that manga) mistakes him for a girl until Bugsy points out that he's a guy. Doesn't help that his team in the remakes is all female, and that he's referred to as female in an official strategy guide.

Many gamers confused Silver for a girl in the early days thanks to his shoulder-length red hair. In his original battle sprite, his jacket could also be mistaken for a Little Black Dress.

Vindicated by History: Inverted, actually! Generation 2 was once arguably the most popular generation, but as time went on it slowly became more divisive and has largely been supplanted by its own remakes.

Visual Effects of Awesome: The battle graphics have some truly beautiful color cycling and sprite distortion effects, otherwise unheard of in an 8 bit game. Not even sprite animations in Emerald could match the dynamic animation in Crystal.

Jasmine is remarkably put-upon in-game; she's quite embarrassed when you find her at the all-you-can-eat diner, and Erika seems out to make her look foolish during the latter's off-time.

Blaine. His entire island of Cinnabar was burned down by a volcano, and he had to move his Gym to a small cave in one of the Seafoam Islands all alone. Alleviated in HGSS though, as he now has trainers under his stead and the cave is retrofitted.

The final Rocket Grunt.

Woolseyism: Clair's Japanese name means "breath," and is a pun on her TM move, Dragonbreath. This is why when she gives it to you she says "no, it has nothing to do with my breath". The joke is kept in the English version, instead changing the meaning to her having bad breath.

Gen IV: HeartGold and SoulSilver

Accidental Innuendo: Any time Kurt gives you the custom Poké Balls, due to most of them having innuendo-ish names. "Kurt gave you the Friend Balls!" "Kurt gave you the Heavy Balls!" "Kurt gave you the Love Balls!"

Despite being a Bonus Boss, Giovanni only has four Pokémon ranging from Level 40 to 46—if you got past the Elite Four, and you almost certainly have by the time you get to him, you'll have no trouble at all.

Mewtwo is surprisingly not very hard to deal with due to its moveset at Level 70. Half of the time it'll waste turns with Power Swap and Guard Swap (steals your Status Buffs, but if you're trying to catch it, you're not going to Swords Dance) and its only offensive move is Psycho Cut, which runs off its weaker Attack stat.

Speaking of Mewtwo, catching it can turn Red into one of these, despite his reputation as the series' ultimate superboss. Even at its default level of 70 (at least 10 levels below Red's Pokémon), Mewtwo's stats are high enough to sponge attacks from any of Red's Pokémon, compounded by the fact that none of them know any attacks that are super-effective against pure Psychic except for Snorlax's Crunch and Shadow Ball, which Mewtwo can shrug off anyway. On the other hand, Mewtwo's movepool is enormous, and via easily-obtainable TMs, it can be taught strong moves that are super-effective against any of Red's Pokémon (such as Earthquake for Pikachu, Focus Blast for Snorlax and Lapras, Psychic for Venusaur, and Thunder/Thunderbolt for Charizard, Blastoise and Lapras). Combine that with the fact that Mewtwo has the highest Special Attack of any Pokémon obtainable in HGSS, and the battle against the ultimate Pokémon Trainer becomes a cakewalk when he's faced with the ultimate Pokémon.

Lyra causes this for various reasons. There's a huge drift in the fandom on whether she's a Suspiciously Similar Substitute or she simply is Kris redesigned.

Voltorb Flip replacing the slots, and more importantly, removing the ability to buy coins. What's even more infuriating is that the Game Corner was the same as usual in the Japanese version. The Voltorb Flip was essentially a Pokémon-themed Minesweeper except with lots of bullshit and a very low reward rate that gave you coins at a slow trickle, making that Porygon (9999 Coins!) and those super-expensive TMs (+10,000 Coins!!) seem much, much more farther away. That being said, there are some people who like it, although most of them wish you could buy the coins as well.

Ariana is commonly thought to be Silver's mother due to their matching hairstyles, hair color, and affiliation with Team Rocket.

Silver's new hairstyle making him look like a younger Roark has sparked theories that they are related or even the same person. By extension, Ariana being Roark's mother and Byron's ex-wife/ex-girlfriend is also a theory, though less common.

Foe Yay: Silver rips off the player character's clothes at one point. Granted, it was because he couldn't stand to see them wearing Team Rocket's uniform and the player character still has their usual clothes on underneath, but still...

Goddamned Boss: Ho-Oh in SoulSilver and Lugia in HeartGold, at least from a catching perspective. Three of their four moves are VERY powerful, but have 5 PP each. The fourth? Safeguard, which prevents Status conditions. This means that not only is inflicting status problems, a key element in capturing Legendaries, likely off the table (once the other three moves are depleted, they'll spam Safeguard), but also both Legendaries have a mere 40 turns worth of moves before they'll be reduced to Struggle, which will finish them off.

Hype Backlash: While the Hype Backlash hasn't been as severe as with the originals, HGSS have been catching some heat years after their release, especially because the contested nature of the Gen VI games has somewhat vindicated other gens in the fandom's eyes, namely Gens III and V. Namely, while the remakes fix many of the issues the originals had while introducing new content, many have noted that the remakes still suffer from a lot same issues that hurt the originals such as poor availability of Johto's Pokémon, heavy reliance on Kanto Pokémon for the first half of the game, questionable level curves, having the same simplistic plot as the original Johto games, and the Kanto post game still being relatively lacking. Nowadays, its position as the top candidate for best game in the series is a lot more debated with other games like Emerald, Platinum and Black 2 and White 2 being brought up as contenders as well; on 4chan, the anti-HGSS sentiment is most pronounced, and the games are edged out slightly by local Sacred CowB2W2.

It's Easy, so It Sucks: Apart from a few notable exceptions, such as Pryce's team getting buffed up 3 levels, they still didn't fix the low-level curve after departing from Ecruteak City; a primary criticism that plagued GSC. At the very least, the Kanto journey after completing the Elite Four has more appropriate levels.

As mentioned in It's Easy, so It Sucks, the low-level curve still existing after Ecruteak City was a huge disappointment for many returning players.

Apart from Slugma, who can now be hatched from an egg that's rewarded by Primo at the Violet City Pokémon Center, some fans were not pleased that several Johto Pokemon, such as Larvitar, Houndour, Misdreavus, Murkrow, and Sneasel, were still restricted to the post-game Kanto just like in the original GSC. They're found in Johto as well, if you visit the Safari Zone with your guide out and ready.

This applies to some Kanto Pokemon that aren't obtainable anywhere in Johto, such as Clefairy, Diglett, Chansey and Snorlax all while some of them are being teased heavily by the Johto trainers. Not being able to get Chansey in particular for Johto is an odd one given that its evolution, Blissey, was introduced in this generation.

For those who were hoping that a faithfully updated Kanto would have some expanded story content this time around apart from the mission to retrieve the stolen Power Plant part from a last remaining Team Rocket member, not much else was tweaked.

While phonecalls can be ignored and there are no longer limits on how many numbers you can store in the Pokégear, those numbers cannot be deleted period. Other glaring issues with the Pokégear such as low calling rate for NPCs that matter are carried over from the originals too.

Despite the numerous improvements of the game; they still didn't (and because of game design) couldn't remove the low-level curve, which was the one persistent criticism the Johto games faced.

The game doesn't tell you that you can call trainers and ask for rematches. Also, if you're in the timeframe they are, you can beat them, go off screen, call for a rematch, and fight again just like before. The only conundrum here is remembering what time to be there by. There's a lot of trainers, all with specific windows available for battle.

The lack of area-based evolutions, despite the obvious candidates for the areas in Kanto and Johto (Viridian or Ilex Forest for Leafeon, Ice Path or Seafoam Islands for Glaceon, the grass outside the Power Plant for Magneton and Nosepass). HGSS players have no choice but to obtain them from the Sinnoh games.

The low payouts for Pokéathlon, made worse by the slowness of the events themselves making it tedious to farm points. It doesn't help that Pokéathlon is the only reliable source to get the elemental stones before beating the Elite Four. Otherwise you have to rely on the Pokégear calls from certain trainers, who call randomly and tend to talk about irrelevant matters instead of giving the stones.

Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Similarly to FireRed and LeafGreen, one of the games' few weaknesses is how the battles run on the comparatively sluggish and outdated Generation IV engine with slow animations and mostly static sprites, compared to Gen V's fast-paced 60 FPS battles and Gen VI & VII's fully 3D animated battles.

Take That, Scrappy!: Clair, who is infamous for her arrogance and failure to comply to Gym regulations is mocked by several other characters, including other Gym Leaders.

Blue. Your team will be nerfed by Exeggutor's Trick Room, making the slowest Pokémon move first. The Mighty Glacier aspect of Pokémon like Machamp and Rhydon is thus conveniently removed, allowing them to destroy you. This is made even worse by the Physical-Special split and great type coverage provided by their extremely powerful move sets, and his Machamp has No Guard and knows Dynamic Punch. Of course, if you choose to rematch him, he turns out to have gotten a Tyranitar. Oh crap, indeed.

Lance on a rematch is this for one reason and one reason only: Garchomp. Swords Dance plus Outrage equals a very, very bad time for half of your team.

That One Sidequest: Pennant Capture in Pokéathlon Dome. It's hard to control your character unless you have good Skill and Speed. Even then, it's usually up to luck if you do well or not. Your opponents are really good at stealing your flags, and it's hard to steal them back from them. Worst of all, to get 100% Completion in the Pokéathlon Dome, you have to match the second record of fifty flags, when the average player gets somewhere between twenty to thirty. You have 60 seconds; you can only get nine at a time, and it takes four seconds to gather up your flags and switch to your next partner.

Not everyone was fond of the remixed music (particularly the themes for Lavender Town and Goldenrod City), but thankfully Game Freak provided an option in the games that switched everything to the classic eight-bit tunes.

Lack of room decoration.

Inverted with the Pokégear system of trainer rematches. Nobody was happy to see this come back, especially with the much simpler Vs. Seeker from the Gen 1 remakes and the Sinnoh games.

Starting with these games, Nintendo dropped Nob Ogasawara, the translator they'd been using since Red and Blue, in favor of moving localization in-house. Given that Ogasawara had a small following online and the new translators didn't have his knack for natural-sounding dialogue, many fans were miffed by this choice.

Discussed by the Game Freak President in the Celadon Condominiums in Kanto.

"We are remaking an old game, but this is quite a challenge. Old fans would not want us to mess with their good memories... but there is no point in just redoing the same thing, right?"

Not getting the Crystal-added Pokémon Egg from the Daycare Center that had a chance to hatch into a random rare baby Pokémon. It was sometimes neat in Crystal having the chance of obtaining something powerful early on like an Electabuzz or a Magmar.

A sidequest reveals just what happened to Giovanni after his defeat to Red (culminating in you facing him), and expands on Silver's backstory and why he is who he is. What did they do with this? Completely lock it away from the player unless they have a Celebi, and since Wi-Fi events for these games are long over, nobody is going to experience any of it without cheating.

The remakes of Red and Blue introduced Leaf, the female counterpart to Red. Yet if you make the trek to the top of Mt. Silver, you will still find Red regardless of circumstances. It would've been a lot cooler if there's way to fight Leaf instead of Red, be it by connecting with a FRLG game, playing as Lyra etc.

In order to make up for the lack of the Pokétch, it fills the bottom screen with shortcuts to menu options and an interact button. There's one button that toggles your Running Shoes so that you can run without holding down the B button. Since there's few times when running is a bad thing, this is very useful. However, as later games lessened the use of the touch screen, this toggling feature has never returned.

HeartGold and SoulSilver had quite a few mechanics like this. The Berry Pots (which let you grow berries on the go, instead of planting them in a single spot and having to remember where they are) are exclusive to it, and the GB Sounds key item (letting you listen to the soundtrack of the original games by turning it on) doesn't have an equivalent in the Ruby and Sapphire remakes two gens later. By far the biggest, though, is the following Pokémon feature. It's very much cosmetic, but fans enjoy it for adding a lot of flavor, and they eagerly await its return.

Bugsy, big time. He looks even more feminine in the remakes than he did in G/S/C.

Vindicated by History: At the time of release, HeartGold and SoulSilver were very well-received, but there was some debate in the fandom on whether they were better than the original Gen II games or not, with many people continuing to support the originals due to nostalgia. Over time, the Gen II fandom waned, and HGSS not only became unanimously agreed to be better than the originals, but also became one of the top candidates for the best games in the series.

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